“They build safe houses in the schools down here, and those things are built well,” Goers, the son of legendary former Boylan basketball coach Steve Goers, said Monday in a phone interview. “The neighbors who got it worse were less than a half-mile away and we didn’t hear a thing. We wouldn’t have even known the tornado went through here if the power hadn’t gone out for a second and we hadn’t lost cellphone service.”

Vilonia was hit by the most powerful of 31 tornadoes that tore through Arkansas and Oklahoma on Sunday. It left at least 15 dead and cut a half-mile-wide swath through the center of town.

“Entire houses are absolutely gone,” Goers said. “We have been helping people out this morning, boarding up windows and picking up trash on houses on the outskirts of the path, but houses that were in the direct path are just gone.”

Goers’ wife, Amy, was hired two weeks ago as the assistant principal of a new grade school that was going to open in the fall. That school is now gone.

“We have tractors and trailers and help people pick up their properties,” Goers said. “We’re just picking up the outside areas of devastation because you can’t even get into the bad areas. We picked a kayak out of one yard, a photo album, a Bible, a stuffed animal, a cymbal from a drum set. Pieces of wood that are somehow stuck four and five feet into the ground.

“What’s sad is they had one only three years ago that went through the same area. You could tell by the trees. It was really ugly and mangled. The trees that survived were just starting to come back and look good again.”

Like his dad, Goers has been a highly successful basketball coach.

Last year, in his second stint at Booneville, Arkansas, he took a team that had won only three games two years earlier to its first state basketball tournament appearance. This year, he moved on to Vilonia and led a team that had won only one game the year before to a 12-12 record.

Goers said his family’s home was untouched, but three of his players lost their homes, one suffered a broken leg and one suffered several cuts.

“This one is so bad it has literally wiped the land clean, except for pieces of trees sticking up. This one is so bad that people aren’t even looking for their stuff. Everything’s gone and there is no point to even look for it.”